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Philosophy 101
Professor Olsen
Descartes was a philosopher, which Dictionary.com defines as “a person who establishes the central ideas of some movement, cult, etc.,” or, obsoletely, as “an alchemist or occult scientist.” He was one of the greatest philosophers of all time and he lived in the great times of the sixteenth century, or the 1500s, which he was born in, and the seventeenth century. His knowledge was only created for a short time, but will be with us for all times. Descartes is famous for inventing Cartesianism where he decided to take the de off his name.
To start off, this is what DesCartes titled his chapters:
The first one is my favorite. With the fifth one, I don’t understand why he feels he needs to repeat himself. Mediation 4 makes me think of this thing that Professor Olson said about the liar’s parody. A guy who you think is a liar gets up and says, “I’m telling a lie.” Its like, how can you even trust him anymore? The funny thing is, I have a friend just like that. I can never tell if he’s telling the truth, and then sometimes I find my X-Box games in his room when he said he hasn’t seen them. If Descartes could figure out people like that, he would do a great service to all of humanity. Like a lie detector, one that could take a little video of your thoughts and then overlap them to reality to see if they fit. That’s for the future, though. For now we have to live with the false, as well as the true.
Descartes’s philosophy was deep and we can hardly stand to think of it now. Personally, I didn’t really like the style of the book. But this was like before the Internet, so it was harder to write back then. I got through most of the book, though, but some of that time I was accidentally sleeping. The other thing I didn’t like about the book is that it cost us $19.99! For 100 pages!! That’s like 20 cents a page! I can make a copy at the library for TEN cents a page! Luckily I just read the online version I found even though Professor Olsen scintillatingly said to use the book edition. From now on, I think books should cost according to how many pages they are. That way, too, there wouldn’t be so many long books.
Anyways, DesCartes idea was what if we are nothing but a mind? Personally, I find this idea completely invalid. I mean, if we were just like a mind in a jar, how could we move our bodies? Or even our thoughts would be entirely made up. I don’t buy his argument at all.
But even if we were minds in jars, its like then what do we do? Minds in jars would have rights too, like people and animals and unborn children, or like Professor Olson said once, trees, which I don’t really get trees having minds but whatever. Its like asking if unicorns exist and then saying you can’t shoot them because hunting season is morally shut down. With minds having rights, then we would have to protect the brains in jars. But how would we move the jars? Because they would be us. It would be unpossible. Have you ever tried to pick up something you didn’t know you were standing on? We couldn’t move them, so we couldn’t protect their rites.
Something Descartes liked to do was sit in his big chair by the fire and think. To my mind, this is the problem with philosophy. Americans are already known to be too sedimentary. As Wikipedia tells us, currently about 119 million, or 64.5%, of US adults are either overweight or obese. Sitting around is just about the last thing modern Man needs. Although it would probably be fine if the scientists created a fat-burning pill that worked while you sat. Also, it would give you more muscles for every minute you sat, and then you could have abs like The Rock, and then you could use the extra time to philosophize. Although if I’m being honest I’d probably use that time for X-Box. But the scientists need to get to work on that first.
Also, everyone knows if you think too much you start to go crazy. Its like the old story of the mad scientist, who turns into a monster after drinking too much potion. Have you ever seen an evil genius who didn’t think a lot? Theirs more to life than thinking. Walt Whitman said something about that, smelling the roses and whatnot. Before I met my current girlfriend, who I’m going out with now, I was obsessed with this girl from my French class. All the time, I would think about her. It was enough to drive me CRAZY!! I would lie awake and think of us taking a boat to France and I would talk to her in romantic French, and then we would make love on top of that pointy tower. But the funny thing is, I wouldn’t stop thinking about it then. I would just go back to the beginning and start all over. It was enough to drive me crazy!! People can’t live like that. They need to use only 10% of their brain, like science tells us.
DesCartes was an Italian philosopher, hired by the Spanish. The Inquisition was happening at this time, I think, so maybe Descartes was prosecuted for his beliefs? We may never know. I don’t agree with this. People should be allowed to think whatever they want, even if they want to go crazy about it. This is what America is all about. My friend thinks that the twin towers were blown up on purpose by the Democrats, to make a point about abortion, but he shouldn’t be arrested and sent to Guadalajara for that, should he? Though sometimes torture is necessary.
Descartes’ famous and infamous ideas have had great influence for everyone since his time. Since the beginning of time, man has worried about what God looks like and how we were made in His image. Descartes was no different and he thought about this too. Descartes believed in God unlike philosophers and professors today. He said the soul was like a substance, but it was a ghost that hovered around your body and connected to your body through a gland in the brain called the pineapple gland. It is like an adapter if you think about it, like on an iPad. The adapter takes electricity and turns it into words and images and things, eventually. I’ve always wondered about that, but my math wasn’t good enough so I didn’t make it into the engineering major.
I’m not sure if Descartes had the whole picture right. Sometimes I think he was just crazy and needed to take a walk, but I could never think about all those things. He is right like he says, he thinks therefore he is. I don’t think anyone can argue with that, not even DesCartes the man himself. His buddy John Locke disagreed and said we were born with clean plates. Sir Locke was also a philosopher, albeit he lived in a different era. The thing is, if I think and therefore am, then what happens when I’m not thinking? This like really concerns me. Or like what about when your asleep? Does that mean your dead, and then when you wake up its like your alive again? I saw an episode like that on “Greys Anatomy.” Sometimes my girlfriend looks dead when she’s asleep, except I’m not sure if dead people leak drool. Maybe when they’ve just died? But its an allusion, because if you tickle her while she’s sleeping, she’ll hit you really hard, like this one time right in the face! So maybe death is an allusion, too. And what about dreams? Could a dead person dream that he was a Dreamsicle, about to sail off on a delicious tour of the world? The part that freaked me out a little bit about this dream, is that all these people were going to lick me, and I was happy about it. But I don’t believe all that stuff Freud said is right, like his thing about wanting to do it with your mom. Personally, my dad doesn’t even like to do it with my mom. But back to my dream, because at the same time I was dreaming it I KNEW I was dreaming it!! Its like I wasn’t dead OR alive, but somewhere in a middle place, like when I got wasted at the last TKE kegger. Its like the dream had a mind of it’s own or something!
Dreams brings up what DesCartes philosophizes about an Evil Demon. The Evil Demon is the one who creates a pretend world which fools you. You think the un-real world is the real world. The Demon does this because he is Evil, and the definition of evil is fooling you when you don’t even know about it. Its like in The Matrix, a film which pioneered cinematography with 360 degree views, like video games. In the movie, its like the Evil Demon where everyone is trapped in a different world in their minds, where the world is like real. If the world was a happy world, though, I don’t think I’d mind. Like if the Evil Demon was a Happy Demon, where everyone could have fun all the time and eat all the candy they want because after all, they’re just a mind in a jar. In the end, Descartes defeated the Evil Demon anyway.
My question is what happens then when we die? If there’s an Evil Demon running things, does that make hell like heaven? And heavens the hell? In that case we should all like commit crimes of murder, so that we can go to the hell that’s really the heaven. Have you ever noticed that heaven and hell both start with he? I just did. Its like the fact that man was the first human, and a sign that both parts of man contain both evil and good. Maybe that’s why Descartes took the de off his name, because it sounded too much like the fundamental human nature of mankind.
Another thing is, how do we know we’re dead? If we wake up as a mind in a jar and we’re in hell that’s really heaven, does that even mean its all over and we’re dead? Personally, I like to believe that you know your dead when you wake up and its just blackness all around, with no sound or visualness or conscienceness. I think I prefer that to the risk of a hell in a jar. There would be no more pain or work to do, and you could just relax. People don’t relax enough in our country even when their alive.
Back to the Evil Demon, in Descartes’s ruthless vendetta against the Demon, there is one question that comes up. If the Demon created everything you experience, then who created the Demon, was it God? If so, does that cancel out all the heaven-hell stuff? If so, the commitment of murder stuff is off, theirs no way Gods’ gonna put up with that!
And like I keep coming back to, why does the Demon have to be Evil? Why can’t he be a Nice Demon? I think DesCartes is making the Evil Demon his escape goat for everything. I mean, if he created a world where ice cream didn’t make you fat and Selena Gomez was my girlfriend, I’d be totally fine knowing I was a mind in a jar and it was all non-real, you know? Sometimes my mind is in my head and I already pretend that when I’m with my girlfriend! So what’s the big deal?
And anyway, like I said, I had this dream where I KNEW it was me dreaming. I even saw myself as the Dreamsicle. In my mind this disproves Descartes’s argument for sure. He even admits it when he says “I am... wrong” (Mediation 1).
But still, who created God then? Its highly blasé to even ask that question, but we never really went to church growing up anyway in my family. Except on Easter. Or when my grandma died, or mom was having a what she called a spirit of crisis. Some so-called experts declaim that God created himself or maybe that he always existed. Whose to say? I think Descartes put it best when he said: “To this class of objects seem to belong corporeal nature in general and its extension; the figure of extended things, their quantity or magnitude, and their number, as also the place in, and the time during, which they exist, and other things of the same sort” (Mediation 1). I’m not completely sure what he’s referring to, but it seems valid. Its important to note too that I think this is translated from some other language, which could explain the word corporeal, which I don’t think is English.
Related to this, somewhere in the book Descartes says another thing, that you can’t get something from nothing. My sentiments exactly! There’s an old saying that its like squeezing blood from an old dog. For example, we all come from somewhere, even my friend Matt, who doesn’t know who his real parents are. But, like, they had to really exist, right? So how could you get something from nothing? Its like they say, you need money to make money. If you think you don’t, this is known as the gambler’s fallacy. I’ve been trying to tell my girlfriend for 7 months now that you can’t get something from nothing, nor can you get any satisfaction from it.
But in conclusion, whose to say?
Charles Byrne is a writer with stories in publications that include Emrys, Gavialidae, and Scarlet Leaf Review.